LUCST: A novel toolkit for Land Use Land Cover change assessment in the SWAT+ model to support flood management decisions

Abstract

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) change is widely recognised as one of the most important factors impacting river basin hydrology. It is therefore imperative that the hydrological impacts of LULC change are considered for effective flood management and future infrastructure decisions within a catchment. SWAT+, the latest version of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool, has been used extensively to assess the hydrological impacts of LULC change. However, to our knowledge at least, the process of making and assessing such changes in the model is often cumbersome and non-intuitive. This affects the useability of SWAT+ as a decision support tool amongst a wider pool of applied users. In this study, we seek to address this issue by developing a user-friendly toolkit, Land Use Change SWAT+ Toolkit (LUCST), that will: (1) allow the end user to define various LULC change scenarios in their study catchment, (2) run the SWAT+ model with the specified LULC changes, and (3) enable interactive visualisation of the different SWAT+ output variables to quantify the hydrological impacts of LULC change. A System Usability Scale (SUS) survey was conducted with a variety of possible end users to assess the application’s usability. A ‘good’ SUS score (79.8) coupled with user comments (and our own observations) promise good potential for the future of LUCST in helping improve the accessibility of SWAT+ as a decision support tool.
The short video abstract displays a how LUCST is applied: https://youtu.be/QygBidYr4cQ
Software freely available from: https://github.com/alexrigby/LUCST.git

Date of Award	6 Jun 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Sponsors	Ymgynghoriaeth Gwynedd Consultancy & Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarship (KESS)
Supervisor	Sopan Patil (Supervisor), Panagiotis Ritsos (Supervisor) & Peter Butcher (Supervisor)